one button madness
disguised as an RPG
and one-eyed hero
Additional Comments:
Glorg! Glorg Glorg Glorg Glorg Glorg! Glorg!!
Now that that's out my system, it's time to complain about Flash games once again. Huzzah!
To be honest, unlike most of my endeavors into Flash games: boredom or a passing nudge from a friend saying, "Hey! Check this ridiculous game out," I stumbled upon Glorg in a rather unexpected way. I was trawling through the BCRecommender - a marvelous little site where you can randomly find great music on Bandcamp via other people's collective musical interests. It's all quite random, which I love, and helps dig up some stuff I'd likely never discover through Bandcamp's own rather limited search ability using arbitrary methods like tags and such. Glad the function at least exists, but capping it annoys me to no end. Anyway, while indiscriminately rummaging through a flood music, I came across a mini EP by Danny Baranowsky: the soundtrack to something called Glorg. This immediately caught my interest because unlike the great wealth of music found on Bandcamp, this was a composer I recognized thanks his Binding of Isaac soundtrack. After a quick listen, I was more than satisfied with what I heard and downloaded it, but not only that, it struck enough of an interest to hunt down the curious, keytar-adorned, purple Cyclops and learn what his claim to fame is. Just who or what is this Glorg?
Didn't take long to track him down. Instantly, my curiosity was further piqued when I read Glorg was the hero of a game; the basic description of which described it as a one button RPG. Sold! The game stirred up memories of Super Press Space to Win Adventure RPG 2009. Despite that game being an extreme example of minimalism; to the point where it was downright silly, I loved the premise behind it. Minimalist games force developers to rethink common tropes and mechanics. Granted, Super Press Space to Win can be considered not only a satirical twist on gaming in general, but probably even on the single button genre as well. Single button games aren't new by any means - consider anything from the 2600. Though you could argue the technicality of it by pointing out most 2600 games made use of the joystick as well. Super Press Space to Win only used a single input - the space bar. Fair enough. And to help back the argument, Glorg makes, eh...mediocre use of a single button as well. I can only credit Glorg with caution as to the quality of gameplay when it comes to its use of a single input as at times it can be highly dubious and rather frustrating.
But what is Glorg? Glorg is a one-eyed warrior trying to make his way through a series of dungeons, clearing the path of evil denizens with anything he can find, quite possibly including the kitchen sink. Through his perilous quest, he can explore, fight, heal, collect treasure, and play a game of hot potato with some walking calculators. And he can do it all with the single press of a button. Well, that's not right, because sometimes you have to hold the button, or rapidly smash the button, or simply release the button. Ah! The downfall of a single button game rears its ugly head.
Here's the thing: Glorg really isn't that bad of a game. The difficulty is on the easier side, or at least technically it's on the easier side, and the game makes decent use of randomization. As an RPG, though an RPG that is stripped down to its core, it can be hard to come to terms with a single button format. Unlike Super Press Space to Win, where the game defined linearity to the point that it was obvious it was trolling you by having RPG in the title, Glorg is sincere. Super Press Space to Win's sense of RPGness and video game sensibility is totally blown out of proportion and results in something entirely jokey. Glorg tries to adhere to RPG canon in a more traditional sense as well as proper gaming values. You can improve your weapons as you quest, sell off weapons of lesser quality, heal when necessary, collect a bevy of loot, and level periodically. However, there's one caveat. The player has zero control over any of these elements. As such, any sense of Glorg being an RPG is nearly as vapid as Super Press Space to Win, except Glorg finds a way to present it in such a way that it attempts to give semblance to conventional RPG mechanics.
A lot of Glorg is out of the player's hands. In fact, the only thing the player really has control over is the fighting. The player has no say over which weapon he uses or when he can heal. If weapon B is greater in skill than weapon A, then Glorg will auto wield weapon B. Even if weapon A was previously better than a facsimile of weapon B two chests ago? Yes, because weapons are apparently assigned a randomized stat as opposed to every Witch Kettle being better than a Dead Mouse. I guess some dead mice are just more powerful than we're lead on to believe. Perhaps rigor mortis is creating some truly hardened rodents. But none of it really matters as I'm pretty sure each weapon is just assigned a randomized humorous name and the player has no control over the system anyway, so why nitpick? Same with healing, Glorg heals when the game has decided Glorg has lost enough health to initiate a heal sequence; if you have an available med kit.
But enough of the discriminating details. Let's discuss the one element where the player has some definitive input: combat. Combat is easy enough to understand. You can hold for a charge, release to hit or click to block. It's all quite simple really, except when clicks and releases start getting confused by the game and you accidentally try to hit the enemy when you're trying to block or vice versa. And straight up, blocking in this game sucks. Attempting to block a charged attack is tough because there's no indication of the type of charge the enemy is doing. If the enemy charges there's a very good chance you're going to fail the block. Typically, at least in my case, you either throw a block too early while they're performing a full charge, or you wait while it turns out their charge was just a ruse and instead they throw a weakly charged attack. And you can't just spam blocks because either there's an inherent cool down happening behind the scenes (which I'm fairly certain does exist) or you're falling victim to basic click/release tomfoolery. Sparring as a whole is quite easy, but I think most of my deaths came to misinterpreting charged attacks. And once you fail a block, you typically begin to spiral into defeat as the strikes suddenly keep coming and the game begins to misinterpret your mad frenzy of clicks and releases as a desperate means to stay alive. These are the times you wish a second button existed to help differentiate the basic mechanics of combat. Stay out of a death spiral, however, and the game's a breeze. Sounds logical - don't get hit, but a single hit can easily disrupt the flow of combat and bring you to your knees if you're not careful. Same can be said for the tennis matches with the walking TI-81s. I think I was on the second to last level before I realized you can mash yourself out of a daze. Was wondering what the mash function described in the intro was for. Neglect mashing the button and the TI-81s will get a free hit in every time they hit you, and they hit strong.
All in all, Glorg's rather enjoyable for what it offers. It pretty much delivers exactly what it advertises, nothing more, nothing less. The common complaint seems to me monotony, and I get it. Maybe the developer backed himself into a corner going the one button route, but is it really any more monotonous than a cheap copy pasta turn-based RPG? Not really. Attack, heal, loot, move on - rinse and repeat. Pretty much the formula of any turn-based RPG, and exactly that here. Besides, considering half the shit put out by the RPG Maker community; at least Glorg is trying something different, something, perhaps, a bit rash. But it should also be said, Glorg's a time killer - the natural result of being a Flash game. It's a game that can be beaten in roughly an hour tops and is best played as a coffee break distraction - five minutes here, five minutes there kind of thing. I'd recommend the game as something to try, or as an experience in gaming minimalism, or a chance to enjoy a fantastic soundtrack. Or you can just grab the soundtrack for free over on Danny Baranowsky's Bandcamp page...or for any amount of your choosing to help tell Danny B., "Please make more amazing music, kthxbai."
Nano-Rant:
Likely the best thing about Glorg is its music, however, the game appeared to be plagued by a nasty bug that kept preventing the music from playing every now and then. Only when you traveled to a new area that played a different track would the music start playing again. For those ranting about how monotonous the game already is, once you strip away the music, the game practically becomes a trivial act of repetitious mouse clicking equatable to banging your head against the wall. Explore. Explore. Explore. Explore. Bleh....
Nano-Win
There is some badass box art that exists for this game, though I'm uncertain of its legitimacy as I can only find one site that even refers to it. Ah well.
Rating: 2.5 hot potato playing TI-81s out of 5
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